


A Better Version

by Crowgirl



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, First Kiss, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Sketching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-06
Updated: 2012-08-06
Packaged: 2017-11-11 13:54:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/479242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowgirl/pseuds/Crowgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scraps of paper, carefully opened envelopes, half-sheets from motel notepads: Castiel has repurposed them all at one time or another and he can only pray that Dean will lose interest before he realises what he’s looking at.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Better Version

‘Hey, Cas, did you have that list Sam made of--oh....huh...’

Dean’s voice falls silent and Castiel, who has not really been listening, turns his attention back to the preparation of salt rounds. Sam had taught him before going on a run for more supplies. Castiel finds the task repetitive but pleasing in a strange way: making up the small, self-contained canisters is satisfying and he likes knowing that the boys will be safer because of what he has done.

‘Cas, what’re all these?’ Dean’s hand thrusts a sheaf of papers under his nose and Castiel blinks, refocuses his eyes, and feels himself go pale.

‘I...was wondering if I could draw.’

 _‘If._ Christ, these are...’ Dean sits down in the chair opposite him, slowly leafing through the pile. 

Scraps of paper, carefully opened envelopes, half-sheets from motel notepads: Castiel has repurposed them all at one time or another and he can only pray that Dean will lose interest before he realises what he’s looking at.

‘Where did you learn to do this?’ Dean glances up at him, then looks back down at the papers in his hands, slowly turning over one sheet at a time.

‘A long time ago. Someone...taught me.’ Castiel is ashamed that he cannot remember the girl’s name -- he had not known her very long, only a few hours in a condemned cell. 

Dean nods, looking back at the sheets. He’s made two piles and is carefully turning from one to the other. He stops at one, quick pencil lines on a half-sheet of ruled paper torn from some notebook. He studies it for a long minute, long enough to make Castiel’s palms grow damp. He tries to set down a completed cartridge and fumbles it. It rolls onto the carpet and he bends to pick it up. When he sits up again, Dean is still studying the rough sketch.

‘Are these just...I mean... do you just...make this up or...or what?’ He touches the pencil lines cautiously, with a light fingertip, and looks up at Castiel.

Castiel feels his mouth go dry and swallows hard. He picks up an empty cartridge but holds it instead of starting to fill it. ‘I...they are...what I see.’ 

Thank Heaven he had never had much of a gift for faces. Unless Dean is feeling extremely clever, he will be unlikely to identify his own wrist bones or hands or the twist of his shoulders when he was working on something late at night and trying to keep himself awake with too much coffee. Although if he keeps staring at the sketch in front of him, Castiel supposes there’s just a chance he might recognize the lines of his own body, asleep on a lumpy hospital couch.

Dean nods again and goes back to the sheets. He studies the drawing in front of him -- Dean’s right hand, Castiel could tell even upside down from across the table -- and then taps it a couple of times with a forefinger. ‘How long’ve you been doing this?’

‘I was taught many years ago.’ Several centuries, in fact, but who’s counting? ‘I...wondered if I still had the knack.’

‘Do me.’

‘What!’ Castiel’s hand jerks and he spills the salt he had been carefully measuring into a cartridge in a fan spray over the table. 

‘Nice.’ Dean brushes the salt back into a neat pile and sits back in his chair, spreading his hands. ‘You said you wanted to practice. So draw me.’

‘I...Dean, these need to be finished--’ Castiel fumbles with the empty cardboard case, trying vainly to remeasure the salt and crimp the end with fingers gone suddenly numb.

‘We’ve got the rest of the afternoon. It’s only two. We can’t even think about hitting that house until it starts to get dark. So c’mon--’ He reaches across the table and cuffs Castiel’s shoulder lightly. ‘Show me what you’ve got.’

* * *

Dean takes over the job of finishing the cartridges while Castiel goes through the pockets of his coat to find a pencil and the carefully hoarded folded sheets he keeps in an inside pocket. 

He goes back to the table by the window, smooths the sheet on the table, and looks across at Dean.

Dean glances up and winks at him. ‘Do your worst, Michelangelo.’

‘Dean--’

‘Sorry, sorry, just a joke. Seriously, Cas, I just want to see.’ And he goes back to filling the cartridges, apparently completely uninterested in anything Castiel might be doing.

Castiel smoothes the sheet out again, folding and unfolding a corner of the paper until it lies flat, and braces the pencil between thumb and forefinger.

He watches Dean.

The sky outside is cloudy bright and there is sufficient light coming through the lightly curtained window to make the floor lamp beside the table unnecessary. Dean measures, fills, and crimps in neat, rapid procession, lining up cartridge after cartridge in ranks on the tabletop. The brass ends shine in the dim light. An occasional brighter beam of light through the gauzy curtains strikes a glint from the heavy silver ring on Dean’s hand. 

The ring was one of the first reasons Castiel had for sitting down with the pencil, really. It had been about -- a year ago, perhaps a little less, and they had been snowbound in western Oregon. It had been Sam’s turn to slog to the nearby convenience store for food and Dean had been whiling away the time playing something he claimed was tabletop football. He tried to explain the complexities to Castiel but the angel had clearly missed something because Dean dismissed him in disgust and set it up so he could play against himself. 

Castiel had rescued a crumpled scrap of paper from the floor and, sitting crosslegged at the end of the bed, had watched Dean circle the table alternately cheering and booing his own moves with a folded rectangle of paper. The heavy ring had gotten in his way, so he had taken it off, shoving it in the front pocket of his jeans. Without the silver band, there was a pale indentation around his finger and Castiel had found himself drawing, marking out lines that he thought were comprehensively awkward.

Perhaps it had been less the ring and more the frustration of not getting it _right_ that had led him to keep sketching. Months later, he can no longer remember. He knew the rough drawing _looked_ like Dean -- he had the man right in front of him, after all, and he knew what Dean’s hands looked like. But -- it was not _right._

That sketch was somewhere in the pile under Dean’s left elbow now and he hopes that, without the ring and with only the bare suggestion of an arm attached to the hand, it is impossible to tell who he had been drawing from. 

After that, though -- it had become almost like meditation for him and it had taken almost another three months for him to realise that the subject he returned to again and again, the only sketches he ever kept -- were of Dean. They were rarely anything more than impressions, lines and shading, never any color because he had none. But he had felt real satisfaction -- and a brush of something else, too -- the first time he had glanced from subject -- Dean coiled up asleep on a pallet of blankets in the corner of an abandoned hunter's hide -- to sketch and realised he had finally caught what he saw in the pencil lines.

Dean shifts position slightly in the here and now, reaching down for a bag to sweep the rows of completed cartridges into. He drops the half-full bag by his feet and picks another handful of empty cartridges out of the box on the windowsill. 

Castiel looks down at the blank paper in front of him.

It had been something of a shock when he realised what he was doing. He was unsure even now if it was what he had been doing or the fact that it had taken him so long to notice that was the more startling. It was not as if he laboured under any illusion for his reason for being here: it was, quite literally, Dean. 

He was equally sure, however, that drawings were not what his commanders had meant him to do. Getting the curve between Dean’s forefinger and thumb down correctly was surely less important than making sure he stayed _alive_ \-- but Castiel was doing both and why could he not steal the occasional five minutes for something else? 

He watches Dean’s hands now, watching the quick, sure movements of measuring out the salt, filling the cylinder, crimping the end -- a slight tap on the table and the finished cartridge goes at the start of another row. 

It had taken another month or so before Castiel was willing to acknowledge, even to himself, that the drawings were...possibly...perhaps...maybe... a substitute for...something else. What that something else was -- he did not consider too closely. What was the point?

He looks down at the paper again, tapping the tip of the pencil against it, and starts to draw. It is not as though the material is unfamiliar to him: he can limn Dean’s hands in smooth lines almost without having to look up. The silver ring is shaded in and a quick scatter of lines marks the thong bracelet on his wrist. 

‘Let me see.’ The real hand interposes and pulls the paper around as he lifts the pencil away to consider.

‘Dean --’ He scrabbles at the edge of the paper but Dean is too quick and it’s gone from under his hands. ‘It is nothing -- a...I...I was never very good--’

Dean studies the new sketch for a moment, then looks up at him. ‘It’s me.’

Castiel shrugs, sitting back in his chair, dropping the pencil on the table. ‘You were here.’

‘No, I mean--’ Dean adds the new sketch to the pile under his elbow and drops the lot in front of Castiel who is starting to feel a cold sick sinking in his stomach. ‘They’re _all_ me.’

‘I...Dean, I...’ Castiel fumbles, drops the pencil, and covers the pile of papers with his hands, as if they were in danger of some kind. ‘I...am...I am sorry, I should...I...’

‘I mean...they are, right?’ Dean is looking down at his hands, fingers spread wide on the table. ‘I’m not...’ He frowns and looks up at Castiel. ‘They are me?’

‘Yes.’ Castiel gathers the papers together into a stack, curling his fingers over them protectively. ‘They are.’

Dean’s abrupt laugh startles him and he looks up to see the younger man grinning at him.

‘Good. ‘d hate to think there was someone out there I had to go punch.’ Dean gets up and tugs on Castiel’s shoulder, pulling the angel to his feet.

‘Punch?’ Castiel sees the sketches scatter and wants to turn to pick them up. He half-frowns at Dean who isn’t letting go of his arm. ‘Why would you need to do that?’

‘Because I don’t want anyone else to get to do this.’ 

Before Castiel can say anything else, Dean has framed his face with his hands and kissed him, gently, carefully, a light brush of lips only, but enough to leave Castiel breathless with a sudden conviction that _this_ is what he had been missing all those months. 

‘I can’t draw for shit, though.’ Dean draws back far enough to be able to speak, his breath warm against Castiel’s cheek.

Castiel knots his fingers in Dean’s shirt and his voice is surprisingly steady when he speaks. ‘I can teach you.’

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Better Version," Shinedown, _Leave a Whisper_.
> 
> And am I making a reference to Kage Baker's Mendoza? Yes, yes, I think I am.


End file.
